Katie McCoy | Original | Myth
Nov. 3rd, 2024 04:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Character Age: 20. Looks mid 20s. Is not technically older than that, but she has a lot of vaguely remembered life cycles before this one.
Character Species: Human housing a fae soul (pooka). Her eyes are a little catlike and her canines are... not long enough to be fangs, but nevertheless a little longer than they should be.
Current Health: Healthy!
Outfit: Winter clothing appropriate to 2001 to begin with. Casually she often wears long skirts with jumpers and is not often seen without her scarf and beanie.
Character Canon: Original character
Link to History: N/A.
Katie is loosely based on the Changelings from the White Wolf RPG books. The world is the same as our own with a more supernatural bent. Many from mythology are still alive and hidden from the mundane world. They interact in their own societies, fight bloody and political wars, and keep themselves hidden from humankind as much as possible, who in general believe they don’t exist.
Katie is a pooka of the Unseelie court in a world where-- in order to survive the rapidly encroaching human reason of the world and the ousting of whole branches of magic by the church etc-- the fae made a pact centuries ago to protect themselves by inhabiting human shells and mingling with willing human souls. She straddles the line between human and fae and has two souls that must be kept carefully in balance with each other.
- she has a soulmate (Tully) who died when she was nine. She's waiting for him to be reborn so she can find and protect him, the same way he does for her. They're a teacher/student combo who have been circling each other for centuries.
- she was attacked by an anti-fae group who assumed Katie was a helpless child. She broke the back of one with a filing cabinet and shut the other in a car full of extremely angry cats.
- tried showing her human mother what she really was. Her mother had a breakdown and attacked her with a knife.
- her grief and trauma over these events caused her to lash out and make her parents (human) seek psychiatric help which is often a death sentence for the fae (human reason. banality.) Her court protected her by sending her to the US and glamouring her parents into forgetting she ever existed
- came back to England when more stable, immediately went back to being An Annoyance to the local sidhe in the court
- they responded by knighting her in a ceremony designed to distract their subjects from a scandal Katie exposed by making Katie the scandal (someone knighted a pooka? ew.) Being knighted also meant she had to take vows to serve said sidhe, so. checkmate.
- meanwhile in her human life she became a police constable to put herself in a position she could try to protect kids from going through what she witnessed
- investigating a group of missing children both as a constable and a knight, traced them to a dark ritual being performed to channel a wave of nightmare glamour safely away from Bath, and was told if she interrupted the ritual the backlash would hit the entirety of Bath. No contest. Katie dived into a river of literal nightmare fuel to get them out, aged by a good five years, rescued them, and went back to a city that was in full riot mode. Whoops.
- Also cold iron burns her, she hates the sound of church bells and she can't cross running water. You know, the usual. Please don't throw salt over your shoulder. It's very rude.
Skills: Actually trained as a squire before being knighted. She can maintain armour/weapons, knows court etiquette, and is competent with a sword. She also has basic police training but tbf she's already forgotten most of it.
Canon Abilities:
- Can turn into a cat as long as nobody is looking. And vice versa.
- Her athletic skills are heightened by her general cat nature; that is to say she can jump higher than average, lands on her feet, etc etc. Apex predator behaviour. Heightened senses. Her eyes reflect in the dark.
- She's looked on fondly by cats in general and can summon every cat within about a block's radius, who will happily do something for her if it's within possibility and their little cat natures.
- Katie primarily specialises in the art of Wayfare which is jumping very long distances, always landing safely, and creating a doorway through whatever surface. And teleporting. A combination of the above. Her favourite trick is to draw a chalk outline of a door and then open it to an entirely different place. She can make other people jump long distances/teleport. (They get the safe landing, too.)
- She can heal wounds in the living and in structures (like cracks in buildings). She can open old wounds. She can summon a will o' the wisp to guide her to a target (it might take her the scenic route but it'll get her there in the end). She can ask questions of rocks/trees/simple manmade structures and get answers from them (through the lens of how it's perceived by the thing in question. A rock doesn't really tell you much.)
- Pooka are the keepers of secrets. They are really, really easy to talk to and people often confide in them when they wouldn't otherwise. (This is an opt in permission only.) By the same token, over centuries their love of playing word games has solidified into a geas that means they cannot tell the truth without hurting themselves. Being honest once will give Katie a headache. Doing it multiple times in the one conversation will slowly kill her. (Universal truths such as "the sky is blue" don't count. Common knowledge is common knowledge.) Ergo, they end up stuffed to the brim with secrets they never pass on.
- As a creature of glamour and dreams, she is literally bolstered and powered by belief and hurt by disbelief. Katie tends to avoid the very logical as a result. She can also see the echoes of dreams around people. They're rare, but if a person is particularly obsessed or particularly traumatised (or very very young) Katie will see reflections around them that hint to this.
- Promises hold weight. Any promise Katie makes she has to keep or she will face consequences. Buuut by the same token if someone is foolish enough to promise her something... the same holds true.
- Her real form has cat ears and a tail and a much more feral face. People normally cannot see this-- she registers as a regular human. Katie can enchant them so they can see what she sees. If she does that, those people can also see echoes. This can be dangerous. Interacting with echoes makes them stronger and very occasionally gives them a life of their own. Katie...does not do this.
- When absolutely desperate and at her limit, she can call upon the Wyrd and bring the full weight of fae magic down, unfettered by human limitation. This... is very dangerous and will leave her in a state of insanity afterwards as her two souls get incredibly out of balance. She also does not do this. Not after the first time.
Role Qualities/Attributes: Heightened danger sense, probably her fangs will grow longer.
Role Reasoning: Katie is a very chaotic neutral sort of person at heart. She puts freedom above all else. She is compassionate and she likes to play the hero, but the key word here is play: that's a childhood dream of wanting to be a hero that doesn't play out in reality. If someone gets on her bad side, the kid gloves go and she gets nasty. I'd like to play her from one extreme of that to the other over time.
- What was the most traumatic experience your character endured? How did this change them?
- Everything to do with her human parents. Her father Thom did know she was fae as he had fae blood himself; her mother Sally didn't. So while Thom had some vague idea of what was going on with his daughter, Sally only knew Katie was acting out more, was a compulsive liar now, got into trouble, skipped school, came home with injuries... the day Katie enchanted her mother was the first day she was threatened with going to see a child psychologist, and Katie tried to show her mother the truth the only way she knew how. Her mother ironically believed enough about Changeling stories to believe her daughter had been replaced with a monster and attacked her demanding her daughter back. Other fae intervened and her mother's memory was wiped, but her father held a bit of a grudge for temporarily turning his wife mad.
- After Tully died she was grieving and lashing out and her parents raised the psychologist stuff all over again and she came close to attacking them. This time the fae went "enough is enough" and sent her to the US, and used her absence to make both her parents believe Katie had never existed. This was meant to be a kindness to protect one of their own, but she has never recovered from this. She's always low key terrified that showing her real form will get the same reaction. She does not do this.
- What experience challenged your character's core beliefs? How did they handle this or change from it?
- When Katie first awakened to being a pooka, she absolutely wanted to be a knight of the fae court and protect the weak and held the sidhe up as nobles worth following and generally be a hero in the way naive children want to be. The local baron was a seemingly kindhearted sidhe who spent a lot of time playing board games with her and she would have happily been his knight. However, she found a starved satyr child in a locked room in his keep one night who had been abused beyond belief and she took the discovery back to Tully, who rallied the common folk to investigate. Turns out the baron was actually an incredibly awful person. There was an uprising; the Baron's loyal followers lost, but not before (a) Katie realised the full gravity of what had been done to the child and (b) Tully was stabbed to death with a cold iron knife by the very satyr she was trying to rescue.
- Turns out this was a really great eye opener on how those in power tend to really suck! She's hated the sidhe ever since and she very much trusts absolutely nobody who claims absolute power. She's always looking for the cracks. If she finds them, she will tear those people down.
- What is the most important and defining relationship(s) in your character's life and why?
- Tully. He isn't a pooka like her; he's a troll, considered one of the nobler races, honourable, loyal, stoic, strong. Their souls are linked and every time one of them dies and is reborn, the other finds them again. Sometimes, they're the same age. Oftentimes, there's enough of an age gap that one acts as mentor to the other just being reintroduced to fae society. People joked in this current life that Tully only put up with her because he had centuries of patience, which isn't exactly inaccurate. He died when Katie was still very young and she's been waiting this entire time for his soul to find a new home. Once he does, she'll know. She has his axe and she'll give it back to him, the same way every time she gets reborn he brings her the magical ball of wool she made centuries ago. There's nothing romantic between them; at their closest in age, they're friends and comrades in arms. When there's a difference, it's more parental. (Or when Katie is the older one, she becomes the crazy wine aunt.)
- Is your character capable of forgiveness or will they hold a grudge until they die? Would anything ever make them change their mind?
- She is capable of forgiveness, but it has to be very much earned, and often what is needed to earn it goes above and beyond the initial slight against her to begin with. There's nuance, however; sometimes, all Katie needs is an explanation of why. If she understands the person's reasoning or sees they genuinely regret it, she may let the grievance go, depending on how serious it was. And sometimes a person is unforgivable no matter their reasons. The person who stabbed Tully to death was the same satyr child who was traumatised, then handed a dagger and told they could have their freedom if they just murdered the big blue guy. Katie doesn't care about this reasoning. She doesn't care that the satyr child had been through hell. Tully died. If she ever sees the satyr again, Katie's going to tear her apart. No amount of recompense will help.
- If your character could change one thing about their past, what would it be and why? Or why not?
- Bonus round: sometimes she considers if it would have been better never to have gone back to Tully with tales about abused children in the keep. Because then Tully would still be alive. It would only mean the satyr never got rescued, never got discovered, the Baron would probably go on to hurt someone else, the rule of the sidhe would continue to rot. Probably more terrible things would happen. Probably, Katie was going to be the next child. She doesn't know. But. Tully would be alive.
- So would she change it?
- She doesn't know. She has never settled on an answer.
- That haunts her sometimes.
Pronouns: She/her
Are you over 18?: Oh my yes
Contact(s): kayjayyy on Plurk
Link to invitation: Current player
Current Characters: April O'Neil, Otono-Tachibana Makie
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